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As the end of the holiday season draws closer every minute, every Internet Tough Guy knows he’d better be ready for the new session of that time of the year. Indeed, it’s once again time to compete with other nerds on the utterly vital subject of "who’s got the biggest internet cock". In the particular division where I compete, one of the major trials, the one where the tiniest faute de goût might be critical, is the one where the future winner has to pick up one piece of software from the bottomless pit of mediocrity that has flooded the year 2004, that not only has to be less shitty than the rest of the garbage the game creators have unleashed upon us this year, but also must perfectly match the color of his shoes.
Needless to say, non-Japanese games are unfit for the competition; American ones are unfit because they will cost the competitor a greater loss in fashion points than he would ever manage to gather in the first place. All other games are unfit because if you want to preserve in the weak mind of your most retarded readers the illusion that you are amazingly import savvy, you’d better try to be as racist as you imagine the Japanese to be. Metal Gear Solid 3 is completely unthinkable, since the commercial success is as fatal to a game’s aura as the light of day or the contact of soap is to the skin of the competitor. Pseudo-obscure games like Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne might have done the trick if they hadn’t released it in English, raising the risk that the audience might have heard of it or even (gasp!) played it. Katamari Damashii might have been a good pick, but its recent overseas release prevents it from being another Zoku Segare Ijiri, and it will just rot in the category of the "games that could have been great but unfortunately became successful", like Zettai Zetsumei Toshi or Siren. Some might consider Dragon Quest 8 as an obscure hardcore gamer gem, but they also are the ones who rush to the first forum to say "I found a bug: I went to a church, and then a girl asked me if I wanted to save, and I said ‘no’, and then the screen went black and the game froze".
Okay, so, the mandatory "first page of the review that talks about everything but the game in question" is filled, all I have to do now is to stick here and there a few pretentious words without bothering to check their meaning, add some free name dropping and voilà. Yay for me! Regular IC reader, you can close your browser now, I’m going to talk about the game.
THE ARTICLE STARTS HERE.
The game I am about to pick as my "Game of the Year 2004" is called Ie, Tatemasu! ("let’s build your house!", as they say on the guide book); it’s a fan-made erotic game. And the most basic type, too: a simulation game. For those of you not familiar with the genre, you basically see the character you’re supposed to be talking to, read the dialogue, and sometimes make a choice (between, for example: "go to the pachinko" or "pay a visit to this character"). Sometimes, when, hum, something visual happens that words would be unfit to describe properly, you are shown a still illustration of the scene while the text still runs down the CG. Basically, these games are very, very slow slideshows of pornographic drawings with a lot of text, and very few interactive elements. There are two key persons involved in the development of this type of game. One is the scenario writer, who has to create entertaining text, and characters that are entertaining to "interact" with, and the other is the CG artist, who has to draw pictures capable of making the player pleased with the action taking place before his eyes. Actually, the studio behind Ie, Tatemasu!, Underground Campaign, counts only those two roles, with the writer (Senga Migiri) doing also the basic programming job, while the artist goes by the name of jin. I think jin is extremely skilled, if only because he managed to render in some of his drawings something that’s seemingly impossible in the japanese porn industry as a whole. That is to say: showing two people kissing normally.
<Brandon’s note: traditionally there is also a music and sound composer, and often voice actors. Sometimes a programmer is not even necessary, as there are dedicated programs that can generate multi-path dating sim games with nothing more required of the developers than inputting text/image/sound data into specific fields.>
As a simulation game, I have to say that it is not great in any aspect. The text flows slowly, the interactive part is limited to a few choices per day (the scenario unfolds day by day) and sometimes no choice at all. There are very few flags that trigger any given event that is a few days off, there is no voice acting at all, and finally the music ranges between "fairly honest" to "parasites in the headphones".
Now, I guess you, the many readers of this article all around the world, are quite puzzled about my decision to pick this game as my favorite of the year, and I can also see both of you wondering "what is this house building business anyways?"
THAT’S AN EXCELLENT QUESTION, thank you for asking. As you may know, many games of this type focus on a particular socio-professional category of characters for your in-game avatar to screw with, and this game is no exception. And since there have already been plenty of games involving nurses, OL <office ladies – B>, cheerleaders, policewomen and schoolgirls of different ages, chest development or optical healthiness, UGCP decided to focus on a widely ignored sexual archetype: the big sweaty muscular construction workers.
Moeeee…
Moeeeeeee!!
MOEEEEEEEE!!!!!
While the number of games picturing women involved in various sexual acts of variable degrading intensity has been growing at an ungodly rate, homosexual men have been strangely late to jump in that particular depraved wagon of lust and easy bucks. While it may be a bit obvious to point out the very different (and shy) nature of gay men in Japan, it probably plays a role in the absence of a small gay equivalent to Elf or Alice Soft. It is particularly telling that a few years ago, girls began to create porn games for themselves, and unfortunately for the world, they are nothing less than yaoi games.
<Brandon’s note: Yaoi and shonen-ai are both terms that refer to entertainment media (games, anime, manga) that involve pretty men/boys falling in love and/or engaging in sexual activity. They are largely designed by girls, for girls, and in general, legitimate homosexual men have very little interest in the stuff.>
I would really like to say "it’s completely uninteresting so I won’t talk about it", but unfortunately, the world is not fair enough to allow me to do so. I’m not saying women shouldn’t play this kind of game, and in fact there are already a few romantic dating simulations (that do not include sexual elements) where the main character is a girl lost in a harem of ambiguous men, and some are extremely well done and entertaining, even for open minded heterosexual men (or so have I been told).
The biggest problem is elsewhere: as if the universe hadn’t been already rough enough to gay men, who already have to cope with AIDS and the drag queen phenomenon, it also created the unmovable rule that says that when a Japanese girl (and more and more often western girls who wish they were Japanese, and a few hundred pounds lighter) who foolishly thinks she has the slightest talent for drawing wants to create something slightly erotic, it invariably involves a couple of men. The horror produced this way usually involves extremely effeminate men in various situations that all have one thing in common. That is their extreme unlikeliness, and an utterly bizarre image of gay men that is not unlike the depressing way lesbian women are shown in straight porn.
Anyway, my point is that there were already several groups devoted to the making of yaoi games when UGCP began to work on its first game. It was not even the first gay studio, since there’s Rycanthropy, who makes an extremely fun stripping game reminiscent of Quix. And before this game UGCP made another adventure game by the name of Utsurogami.
What I mean is that what makes Ie, Tatemasu! my game of the year is not its novelty. There were already a few, if not plenty of games involving men humping each other, and not one of them was more valuable than any of the thousands of straight porn games that got released in Japan in the last 24 hours. What makes this game truly unique is the way it deals with the inherent fantasy elements of the porn genre.
Porn is fantasy. It’s something that takes place outside the real world, for entertainment purposes. To be easily understood, it uses a wide numbers of codes so that the client can get in the action as fast as possible. For example, an unwritten rule in most straight porn is that women are harlots only waiting for a real man to cover them with various body fluids. In gay porn, it would be that there is no such thing as a straight man; and also that (except for very particular niche products) at every moment of the day, in every situation, even a character lost in a wild desert for 3 months manages to be squeaky-clean inside and out, as if he had just showered his colon up to the stomach.
This last rule is set in stone in the gay porn world, and it doesn’t need any explanation (or so I hope). The other is more flexible, and it is always funny to see an actor gazing at a flamboyant fag like a goldfish, with all the acting talent he developed by watching TV 2 hours a day, thinking some great line like "Oh, my sister’s husband is so hot! Too bad he’s STRAIGHT!" 2 minutes before having his ass grabbed in the shower by the brother in law.
These rules are important, because they create the foundations of the relationship between the customer and the porn product. As you move to smaller niche products, other unspoken rules can apply, and it’s up to the customer to see if he accepts these rules or not. For many people, the concept (vital for porn games) of masturbating to drawings doesn’t work, and the contract between the product and him can’t be finalized.
I don’t want to know what kind of unspoken rules apply to the porn material the hero is using in this picture.
[Legal note : because of the pornographic nature of the events depicted within the game, in order to protect the youth and the more fragile of our readers, the law obliges us to present each potentially shocking screenshot in MOK-KOS Vision ©.]
Back to the game. The action takes place in a small village on the west coast of Japan, where the construction workers are called from Tôkyô to build a house for a widower and his two sons. The first event takes place the very first night and is completely unavoidable; it shows the introduction, if I can use that word, of the main character (Hideki), to the alternate universe of a gay porn game. It begins with his discovery that his boss, about whom he fantasized secretly, is actually gay (and, because nothing must go to waste in such matters, it shows that he in turn also fantasized about Hideki since the very first day he hired him). Once you have played the game for even a few minutes, the fact they managed to hide so long from each other will puzzle you to no end; the only rational explanation is that since Hideki has entered in the world of a porn game, every single male character magically turned gay. By every single male character I also mean the widower and his two sons.
Let me take a short break to say that I would be very happy if I could be sure Brandon asked me to write this article because he thought this was an interesting subject, not because he thought of all the traffic this endless repetition of the words "gay porn" would bring to IC. You can’t imagine how much I would like to be sure of it.
<Brandon’s note: guess we’ll never know…>
[next: To fairy land!]
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